Surely 'ubi' is wrong here? Orberg means 'whither', that is, 'quo'. As in 'Quo vadis?' We're not talking about the PLACE WHERE the wind was blowing but the place IN THE DIRECTION OF WHICH the wind was blowing (otherwise the ships wouldn't get there, would they?).

naves ferebantur ad eum locum quo ventus ibat.

That sounds more like Latin and less like English to me (though I've been wrong before).

Good point, Interaxus, I was thinking the same thing.... Although, if the point of this exercise is to paraphrase quo, it helps if quo doesn't occur in the paraphrase! So we would have to go one step further and say:

Naves ferebantur ad eum locum ad quem ventus ibat.

But now this doesn't sound very much like Latin again.... So perhaps we've come full circle and illustrated the advantage of using quo in the first place!

Actually no: if someone says that in Latin - naves ferebantur ad eum locum ubi ventus ibat - it means, "The ships were being carried toward that place in which the wind was blowing [but it was not blowing across the intervening distance]."

That's quite different from "The ships were being carried to the place / in the direction to which the wind was taking them."

It can be hard for us English-speakers to grasp but the unde vs. ubi vs. quo distinction is really pervasive in Latin, and the terms are not at all synonymous.

Just for the record, it might be instructive to consult Adams' chapter on Late Latin (from A Companion to the Latin Language), where he discusses the encroachment of static adverbials on directional ones, a phenomenon that was already observable "as early as the 1st century CE, but in popular speech", i.e. not "good" prose. He cites an example from Apuleius of ubi for quo: "ubi, inquit, ducis asinum istum?", noting that it occurs in direct speech.

Damoetas wrote:Actually no: if someone says that in Latin - naves ferebantur ad eum locum ubi ventus ibat - it means, "The ships were being carried toward that place in which the wind was blowing [but it was not blowing across the intervening distance]."